Politics What is happening????

pan6467 · Jun 4, 2012

I don't know 200+ years of a 2 party system seems to have worked out pretty damned good. We still have freedom of and from religion (which 100 years ago we didn't), we have abolished slavery and while yes, it took way to long, we have a black man as president and women in office, we have sown the seeds for others to establish their democracies and civil rights, we may no longer be the beacon of HUMAN RIGHTS, but we are trying and while some are not happy with the speed of which things are progressing they are.... 50 years ago gays hid in closets and suffered through token loveless marriages and today, we are fighting not for them to exist publicly but to be able to marry those they wish to, 50 years ago MLK Jr. was leading a Civil Rights movement and again today we have a black president finishing his first term. Thanks to President Eisenhower's foresight, we have the greatest highway system and arguably the best transportation systems on Earth.

So while some may argue that there should be more parties..... to be honest, I don't see what another party could truly accomplish that the 2 we have can't accomplish. It's not like the parties would get along any better or work together any better, each side whether there are 2, 3, 4, or 50 wants NOTHING MORE than to win and have as much power as possible.

rogue49 · Jun 4, 2012

Meanwhile the Super PACs are taking advantage of every angle in the system.
I'd say that's where our first effort should be getting control of...

Whose Welfare?
NYTimes editorial June 3, 2012

Every week the campaign dollars pile up, by the tens of millions, by the hundreds of millions, to a level never before seen in American political life. Outside groups now say they plan to spend $1 billion on behalf of Republicans in the November election, which will probably be twice the level raised by groups supporting Democrats. Even the slush-funders of the Watergate era would have been slack-jawed at the number of seven- and eight-figure checks pouring into groups with names like Crossroads and Americans for Prosperity.

The reason for these staggering numbers — and for the growing imbalance between the parties — is that the vast financial power of the business world has been loosed as a political tool by the federal courts. In pursuit of lower taxes and less regulation, businesses, led by the United States Chamber of Commerce, are determined to remove President Obama from office and return full control of Congress to the Republican Party. Executives and companies are the principal source of the unlimited checks that are fueling the rise of these outside groups.

Many of the executives are giving money to “super PACs,” which have to disclose their names. But because businesses usually don’t want the public to know of their political activity, they prefer to launder their political contributions through the Chamber or through “social welfare organizations,” which can keep the names a secret.

The law that permits these undisclosed contributions also puts explicit limits on these organizations’ activities. Tax-exempt social welfare groups, known by their Internal Revenue Code section number as 501(c)(4)’s, cannot be organized for the “primary” purpose of political activity. So far, the I.R.S. is looking the other way.

But if not political activity, what is the primary purpose of a group like Crossroads GPS, the 501(c)(4) organized by Karl Rove, which plans to spend more than $100 million this year? It has already run at least a dozen ads this year, 11 of which accuse President Obama of breaking promises or committing serious policy errors. “Obama added almost $16,000 in debt for every American,” says the latest, a classic in misleading political hyperbole.

As Jeremy Peters recently reported in The Times, that ad is part of a $25 million campaign that was based on 18 focus groups and field tests conducted by Crossroads, all to determine the most effective attack lines against the president. Is that the action of a tax-exempt social welfare group not primarily active in politics?

The I.R.S. generally makes that kind of assessment by examining a 501(c)(4)’s activity over a calendar year, so a full reckoning of this year’s campaign finance travesty won’t happen before 2013. But some of these groups, including Crossroads, have been operating with the tax agency’s implicit consent since 2010. Even a cursory audit would show how little they deserve to call themselves a “social welfare group” and claim a tax exemption.

Removing the 501(c)(4) exemption would be serious: it would force Crossroads to either retain its tax exemption by converting to a super PAC and disclosing its donors, or pay taxes on its tens of millions in donations. American voters would win either way: they might learn who is behind those millions, and the disclosure and tax requirements would reduce the shadowy money pouring into the campaign

If the I.R.S. had stood up to this farce last year, it would have had a hugely beneficial effect on this year’s campaign. Though it needs more resources and better legal tools, it mostly requires the will to enforce the law.
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rogue49 · Jun 10, 2012

Nice to know there are good old-school conservatives that see it this way.
It makes me feel like there are still those who value discussion over a circus.

Use the noted link below the headline to get to the article for its links...there are way too many to do so here.

My break with the extreme right
I worked for Reagan and wrote for National Review. But the new hysterical right cares nothing for truth or dignity

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/24/my_break_with_the_extreme_right/singleton
By Michael Fumento - Thursday, May 24, 2012 11:45 AM UTC

Gosh! When did I end up in bed with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber? Could it be because I did specialize in blowing things up while serving my country for four years as an airborne combat engineer? I also watched human beings blown up. I had friends and Navy SEALs I was in battle with blown up. My own intestines exploded on the first of my four combat embeds, three in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Took seven operations to fix the plumbing. I later suffered other permanent injuries.

Yet now I find myself linked not only with the Unabomber, but also Charles Manson and Fidel Castro. Or so says the Chicago-based think tank the Heartland Institute, for which I’ve done work. Heartland erected billboards depicting the above three declaring: “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” Climate scientists now, evidently, share something in common with dictators and mass murderers. Reportedly bin Laden was scheduled to make such an appearance, too.

You see, I’ve published articles saying I do “believe in global warming.” Yes, I’ve also questioned the extent to which man-made gases have contributed to that warming and concluded that expenditures to reduce those emissions would be as worthless as they’d be horrifically expensive. No matter; just call me “Ted.” Or “Charlie.” Or “Fidel.”

This is nuts! Literally. As in “mass hysteria.” That’s a phenomenon I wrote about for a quarter-century, from the heterosexual AIDS “epidemic” to the swine flu “pandemic” that killed vastly fewer people than seasonal flu, to “runaway Toyotas.” Mass hysteria is when a large segment of society loses touch with reality, or goes bonkers, if you will, on a given issue – like believing that an incredibly mild strain of flu could kill eight times as many Americans as normal seasonal flu. (It killed about a third as many.)

I was always way ahead of the curve. And my exposés primarily appeared in right-wing publications. Back when they were interested in serious research. I also founded a conservative college newspaper, held positions in the Reagan administration and at several conservative think tanks, and published five books that conservatives applauded. I’ve written for umpteen major conservative publications – National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, among them.
But no longer. That was the old right. The last thing hysteria promoters want is calm, reasoned argument backed by facts. And I’m horrified that these people have co-opted the name “conservative” to scream their messages of hate and anger.

Extremism in the defense of nothing
Nothing the new right does is evidently outrageous enough to receive more than a peep of indignation from the new right. Heartland pulled its billboards because of funder withdrawals, not because any conservatives spoke up and said it had crossed a line.
Last month U.S. Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican recently considered by some as vice-president material, insisted that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party, again with little condemnation from the new right.
Mitt Romney took a question at a town hall meeting this month from a woman who insisted President Obama be “tried for treason,” without challenging, demurring from or even commenting on her assertion.

And then there’s the late Andrew Breitbart (assassinated on the orders of Obama, natch). A video from February shows him shrieking at peaceful protesters: “You’re freaks and animals! Stop raping people! Stop raping people! You freaks! You filthy freaks! You filthy, filthy, filthy raping, murdering freaks!” He went on for a minute-and-a-half like that. Speak not ill of the dead? Sen. Ted Kennedy’s body was barely cold when Breitbart labeled him “a big ass motherf@#$er,” a “duplicitous bastard” a “prick” and “a special pile of human excrement.”

The new right loved it! Upon his own death shortly after, Breitbart was immediately sanctified and sent to lead the Seraphim. He was repeatedly eulogized as “the most important conservative of our time never to hold office,” skipping right past William F. What’s-his-name Jr.
There was nothing “conservative” about Breitbart. Ever-consummate gentlemen like Buckley and Ronald Reagan would have been mortified by such behavior as Breitbart’s – or West’s or Heartland’s. “There you go again,” the Gipper would have said in his soft but powerful voice.

Civility and respect for order – nay, demand for order – have always been tenets of conservatism. The most prominent work of history’s most prominent conservative, Edmund Burke, was a reaction to the anger and hatred that swept France during the revolution. It would eventually rip the country apart and plunge all of Europe into decades of war. Such is the rotted fruit of mass-produced hate and rage. Burke, not incidentally, was a true Tea Party supporter, risking everything as a member of Parliament to support the rebellion in the United States.

All of today’s right-wing darlings got there by mastering what Burke feared most: screaming “J’accuse! J’accuse!” Turning people against each other. Taking seeds of fear, anger and hatred and planting them to grow a new crop.
Conservatism has also historically emphasized empiricism. Joe Friday of “Dragnet” must have been a conservative: “All we want are the facts, Ma’am.” When President Reagan famously said, “Facts are stupid things,” he meant to quote President John Adams’ observation that “Facts are stubborn things.” But how much fact was there in Heartland’s billboards, whose shock purpose has been likened to tactics of the hard-left animal activist group PETA, with whom I’ve repeatedly locked horns. Or in West’s assertion? Or Breitbart’s tirades? Rush Limbaugh compared Breitbart, who never wrote a single investigative report, to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the dynamic duo who brought down the thoroughly corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon. He actually said Breitbart’s work was superior. Oh, dear!

I know these words coming from somebody identified with the right are heresy – as defined by this new right. An invite to a marshmallow roast with you as guest of honor. Or worse. It’s to be labeled with the ultimate epithet: RINO. Republican in name only. GOP Sen. Scott Brown bears that mark of Cain. Coming from super-liberal Massachusetts, he only has a 74 percent American Conservative Union rating. There you go, then!

So there’s an auto-da-fé out there right now with my name on it. Torquemada is holding the torch; the wieners and s’mores are flying off the shelves. Truth be known, though, I haven’t considered myself a Republican since 1982. Why? That was the year of the massive Reagan tax hike. I figured that’s what liberal Democrats are for. Tore up my donor card and never gave again. By being a conservative at that time, I was a RINO. By being one now, I’m also a RINO. A very curious animal, that.

The hate, anger and fear machine
A single author, Ann Coulter, has published best-selling books accusing liberals, in the titles, of being demonic, godless and treasonous. Michelle Malkin, ranked by the Internet search company PeekYou as having the most traffic of any political blogger, routinely dismisses them as “moonbats, morons and idiots.” Limbaugh infamously dispatched a young woman who expressed her opinion that the government should provide free birth control as a “slut” and a “prostitute.”

As a conservative, I disagree with the political opinions of liberals. But to me, a verbal assault indicates insecurity and weakness on the part of the assaulter, as in “Is that the best they can do?” This playground bullying – the name-calling, the screaming, the horrible accusations – all are intended to stifle debate, the very lifeblood of a democracy.

Meanwhile, these people who practice shutting down the opposition through shouts and smears accuse President Obama of having dictatorial dreams? A recent email I received, based on accusations from umpteen right-wing groups, blared in caps-lock fury: “BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA HAS SIGNED A MARTIAL LAW EXECUTIVE ORDER!” This specific message, from a group calling itself RightMarch.org, goes on: “THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS! BARACK OBAMA IS TRYING TO VIOLATE THE CONSTITUTION, BECOME A DICTATOR, AND TAKE AWAY OUR RIGHTS!”
Outrageous, indeed. Obama’s order updated a National Defense Resource Preparedness act, which was essentially identical to one signed 19 years earlier and actually originated in 1950. It granted no authority to Obama that he did not already have under existing laws.

President Obama is regularly referred to as a Marxist/Socialist, Nazi, tyrant, Muslim terrorist supporter and – let me look this up, but I’ll bet probably the antichrist, too. Yup, there it is! Over 5 million Google references. There should be a contest to see if there’s anything for which Obama hasn’t been accused. Athlete’s foot? The “killer bees”? Maybe. In any case, the very people who coined and promoted such terms as “Bush Derangement Syndrome, Cheney Derangement Syndrome and Palin Derangement Syndrome” have been promoting hysterical attitudes toward Obama since before he was even sworn in.
No, I’m not cherry-picking. When I say “regularly referred to,” interpret literally. Polls show that about half of voting Republican buy into the birther nonsense (one of the more prominent hysterias within the hysteria). Only about a fourth seem truly sure that Obama was actually born here. In her nationally syndicated column Michelle Malkin wrote regarding Limbaugh’s slut remarks, that “I’m sorry the civility police now have an opening to demonize the entire right based on one radio comment.” In a stroke she’s expressed her disdain for civility and declared the new right’s sins can be dispatched as an itsy-bitsy little single faux pas, “one radio comment.”

No, Michelle, incivility – nay, outright meanness and puerility – rears its ugly head daily on your blog, which as I write this on May 23 has one item referring in the headline to “Pig Maher’s boy [Bill Maher]” and another to “Jaczko the Jerk,” [former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko]. She calls Limbaugh target Sandra Fluke a “femme-agogue” and her supporters “[George] Soros monkeys.” Pigs? Monkeys? Moonbats? It’s literal dehumanization.

Sure, there are enough hate-and-anger mongers on the left to go around. Among the worst was Keith Olbermann, who once called Malkin a “mashed up bag of meat with lipstick on it.” Very edifying, Keith! But as the Christian Science Monitor reported, his ratings recently collapsed from an average of 354,000 viewers a night when he debuted on Current TV, to 58,000 viewers by the first quarter of 2012. He was recently fired. Again. Air America was intended to counter right-wing talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh. I was on Al Franken’s show while he made fun of a soldier from my first battle who is now permanently paralyzed. Touché, Al! But Air America also failed.

Malkin, who revels in playing the victim, says that she’s been called all sorts of horrible things, many based on her Filipina heritage. But most of what she cites come from email or anonymous comments on blog sites. It wasn’t usually from paid professionals with large audiences, like her, aimed at paid professionals like her. It’s thus hard to compare with the host of the most popular talk show host in history taking shots at an unknown 22-year-old woman. (She’s hardly that now; Limbaugh himself promoted her to a national spokeswoman.)

Incivility is hardly the domain of the new right. American society grows ever coarser. But this is cold comfort. Conservative ideology demands civility of conservatives; demands, yes, self-policing. Let others act as they will, bearing evidence of the shallowness of their positions. It also demands respect for official offices, such as the presidency. When our guy is in office, you give him that modicum of respect – and when your guy is in office, we do the same. The other party is to be referred to as “the loyal opposition,” not with words the FCC forbids on the air.

part II following...
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rogue49 · Jun 11, 2012

2nd part...
Muckraking becometh buckraking
In the grief-fest at Breitbart’s death, forgiven (and indeed practically forgotten) was his crucial role in building the single most popular liberal website, the Huffington Post. Some of Breitbart’s friends admitted he was absent of ideology. “I don’t recall Andrew Breitbart ever mentioning electoral politics,” wrote Tucker Carlson. “It bored him.” Breitbart’s inspiration, then? George Washington through Benjamin Franklin – printed in primarily green ink on cotton stock.

Limbaugh pulls down a stunning $38 million annual salary. Leaked Heartland Institute documents revealed it’s gotten over $14 million in the past six years from a single individual. RightMarch.com accompanied the Obama-cum-tyrant message with an offer to “Blast Fax” every member of Congress for $139 – for a profit of about $139. Surely these people have their fingers crossed that President Obama is reelected.

I personally know a lot of the leaders of this new rabid right. Most are very nice on a personal basis. Honestly, you’d be shocked. Unlike Breitbart, some began as real conservatives. One called me her mentor in her first book and attended my wedding. Many once sang my praises. Again, unlike Breitbart, Malkin was once a true investigative reporter. You can still see elements of actual research in Ann Coulter’s work, too.

But when times changed, and it became profitable to move from honorable advocacy to shrill name-calling, they changed too. They cashed in their reputations, as well as their ideology, for lucre. Those who didn’t – because conservatism runs against screaming, extremism and sensationalism – began disappearing from the talk shows, magazines and store shelves. They were replaced by pod people.

Conservatism, RIP
You cannot be identified by what you oppose, only by what you stand for. But this curious creature’s main claim to the title of “conservative” is that it hates liberals – as do liberals and lots of others on many points of the political spectrum. Obama is routinely bashed in such places as the Nation. The right-wing Nation?

Indeed in any violent anti-democratic revolution – Jacobite, Bolshevik, National Socialist – the first goal is to eliminate the real competition, those with ideals. The guys who really believed in liberty, fraternity and equality or rule by the proletariat were identified, isolated and eliminated early on to leave only two extremes to choose from. “It’s us or the Bourbons! It’s us or the Romanovs!” In Germany, the conservatives and liberals were dispatched to the labor camps before the Nazis felt safe to send the Jews to the death camps.

The new right cannot advance a conservative agenda precisely because, other than a few small holdouts like the American Conservative magazine or that battleship that refuses to become a museum, George Will, it is not itself conservative. Pod people are running the show. It has no such capability; no such desire. I find that disturbing for obvious reasons. But, based on my own conversations with liberals, I think – nay, I know – that if more of these allegedly godless, treasonous people understood real conservatism a lot would embrace many conservative positions.

Thus everybody realizes government spending has lost its airbrakes. But while the new right screams the most about big government, it nonetheless supported President George W. Bush as he presided over the largest expansion of government spending since uber-liberal FDR and left us with a massive debt before President Obama was sworn in. Why? Silly rabbit! Because the left opposed him.

The same has been said for the right’s otherwise seemingly unfathomable enchantment with Sarah Palin; it’s a defense of their damsel in distress. The veracity of the left’s claims about her are irrelevant. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Or so thought that uber-liberal FDR about good ol’ “Uncle Joe” right to the end, even as conservative Winston Churchill tried desperately to convince him otherwise. And so fell the Iron Curtain.

Eating its own
Obsessed with attacking, the new right will carpet-bomb positions of the old right if the left comes around to it.
Thus the right has traditionally opposed government subsidies. My first cover story was in Buckley’s National Review, arguing against ethanol subsidies that ultimately grew to $6 billion annually. But when the Senate sought to repeal the subsidy last year, right-wing guru and Jack Abramoff henchman Grover Norquist fought it – with the stunning argument that cutting a government subsidy is actually a tax hike in disguise!

And how ironic that for decades liberals unfairly accused conservatives of “McCarthyism” to shut down debate. (Oh, how I remember!) Yet now the right countenances a prominent congressman who has literally outdone “Tailgunner Joe.”
McCarthy’s infamous list comprised only 57 Communists who were merely State Department employees, not “78 to 81” of the nation’s top elected officials.
Pity the poor Onion; there’s nothing left to satirize.

Gridlock
Apart from gaining fame and fortune for a select few, all the new right is accomplishing is turning Bismarck’s words upside down, making politics the art of the impossible. It demonizes the opposition even as it brutally enforces “team loyalty.” So nothing gets done, and bad trends just get worse.

Drastic action is required now, nay yesterday, to start bringing expenditures in line with income. About half our government spending is fueled by borrowing, and that spending accounts for a fourth of GDP. Without borrowing, then, our GDP would drop 12 percent or more – well into depression range.

Entitlement spending, that which requires no new legislation, is en route to consuming all tax revenue.

Excluding the very top earners, household incomes have been declining for a decade.

The real employment level has been trending downward since the mid-1980s. Unemployment for a year or more, the kind that just sucks the heart and soul out of people, is about double what it was in late 2009 – and yet in the 1960s it was essentially nonexistent.

Income inequality is the highest since before the Great Depression, understandably fostering resentment.

For many, the American dream became a nightmare long ago. It’s little wonder that Americans are afraid and angry.
One member of the new right seemed to acknowledge that reckless character assassination was merely stalemating the system. “Let’s come back to the issues,” he told NPR in an interview last year. “Let’s come back to talking about how do we set the conditions here in Washington, D.C., for long-term sustainable economic and job growth.” Unfortunately, that was congressman Allen West.

The right didn’t create this reservoir of fear, anger and hate. But it has both tapped into it and roiled it. Indeed, the right-wing mass hysteria is what sociologists call a “moral panic.” It occurs when a society is undergoing a wrenching transformation. Somebody then comes along and creates a “folk devil” both to provide an explanation for bad conditions, real or imagined, and a target. Kill the devil; eliminate the bad conditions. But the right has no serious incentive to help solve or ameliorate these problems. Indeed, as with the reelection of Obama, it will benefit from their continuation or worsening.

So animosity has now reached levels both hysterical and historical. The last time anything like this occurred was during World War II, when at least it was aimed outward. Before that? Just before the Civil War.
Back then a tall bearded Republican declared, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Just another one of those idiot, moron, “duplicitous bastard” RINOs.

Michael Fumento is an attorney, author, journalist and former paratrooper who has written for National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, The American Spectator, Human Events, Forbes, Forbes.com, Reason, Policy Review, The Spectator (London), The Sunday Times of London, The Wall Street Journal op-ed page and many other publications. His web site is Michael Fumento.com.
Copyright © Salon.com. All rights reserved.
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chipperaroo · Jun 12, 2012

pan6467 said: ↑

I don't know 200+ years of a 2 party system seems to have worked out pretty damned good. We still have freedom of and from religion (which 100 years ago we didn't), we have abolished slavery and while yes, it took way to long, we have a black man as president and women in office, we have sown the seeds for others to establish their democracies and civil rights, we may no longer be the beacon of HUMAN RIGHTS, but we are trying and while some are not happy with the speed of which things are progressing they are.... 50 years ago gays hid in closets and suffered through token loveless marriages and today, we are fighting not for them to exist publicly but to be able to marry those they wish to, 50 years ago MLK Jr. was leading a Civil Rights movement and again today we have a black president finishing his first term. Thanks to President Eisenhower's foresight, we have the greatest highway system and arguably the best transportation systems on Earth.

So while some may argue that there should be more parties..... to be honest, I don't see what another party could truly accomplish that the 2 we have can't accomplish. It's not like the parties would get along any better or work together any better, each side whether there are 2, 3, 4, or 50 wants NOTHING MORE than to win and have as much power as possible.
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I had a poly-sci professor explain to a class I was in, once upon a time, in a far away place, that democracy isn't really designed for more than a 2 party system. Of course you can have other parties, but, notable, throughout history, only 2 parties prevail. When you look @ US support of two warring nations, you'll notice that often enough both have their own side and stand-point, and we choose the lesser of 2 evils compared to our own social values (usually we side with the party that's being impinged upon by another more dominant position, but with better grounding). The same can be said for our own, individual core nature... we tend to make decisions, lean one way or another... not both. Though, similar to Religion being on the decline (ignosticism), many are starting to take middle-ground, looking at what's best in the moment, rather than throwing tomatoes from one side or the other; probably a positive side-effect of the world inundated by information, if not residual over that overload.

rogue49 · Jul 6, 2012

And people are screaming about where the jobs are??? Even the "job creators"
And yet...

This is like screaming that the debt is too high...but then you do everything you can to avoid paying taxes. (oops...there are those "job creators" again)

Or my wife screaming that there's not enough money to shop...after spending it all going shopping.
Funny how that math stuff works...

Companies Using Overtime, Temporary Staff to Meet U.S. Demand
By Shobhana Chandra and Rich Miller - Jul 6, 2012

Companies are relying on existing workers and temporary employees instead of hiring, evidence the European crisis is hurting U.S. confidence more than demand.

The average workweek climbed by six minutes to 34.5 hours in June, the first gain since February, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. Temporary staffing rose by 25,200, the third consecutive increase.

The need to boost hours and add provisional employees is a sign that sales are holding up in the face of a deepening slump in Europe and a slowdown in China and the rest of the world. Nonetheless, businesses may lack conviction that revenue gains will be sustained in light of the threats, making them reluctant to permanently expand payrolls.

“Firms are still seeing an increase in demand, and there is a need for more labor,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts. “But there are so many risks out there that businesses don’t want to commit to hiring full-time employees.”

Payrolls advanced by 80,000 workers in June, fewer than the median estimate of 100,000 in a Bloomberg News survey of economists, after a 77,000 rise the prior month, today’s report showed. The lack of hiring fueled concern the world’s largest economy was slowing, pushing stocks down, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index heading for its biggest weekly loss in a month.

The pickup in hours “suggests there might be a little better momentum in the economy,” Bruce Kasman, chief economist for JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York, said on a conference call. At the same time, there is “an absence of a real desire by firms to act on that in terms of hiring.”

Payroll Equivalent

The six-minute increase in the average workweek would be equivalent to a 325,000 gain in payrolls, according to estimates by economists at Nomura Securities International Inc. headed by Lewis Alexander.

Automobiles are one area where demand is holding up. Cars and light trucks sold at a 14.1 million annual rate in June, up from May’s 13.7 million pace, Ward’s Automotive Group data showed. General Motors Co. (GM), Ford Motor Co. (F) and Chrysler Group LLC reported U.S. sales that topped analysts’ estimates, helping the industry surpass projections and stay on pace for the best year since 2007.

“We’re seeing strong demand for our current products as well as for our new models,” Bill Krueger, vice chairman of the Americas for Nissan Motor Co., said in a telephone interview. The Yokohama, Japan-based automaker plans to boost hours, add shifts or increase payrolls at plants in Tennessee and Mississippi “to really have the supply catch up with demand,” he said.

Factory Workweek

Manufacturers were among those asking existing employees to put in a longer workweek last month. Factory overtime climbed to 4.7 hours in June on average, the most in five years, today’s report showed.

In another bright spot, workers’ average hourly earnings rose to $23.50 in June from $23.44 in the prior month, today’s report showed.

“For the 92 percent of folks who have jobs, their incomes are rising, raises are still happening,” said Chris Varvares, senior managing director of Macroeconomic Advisers LLC in St. Louis.

Consumers are benefiting from falling gasoline prices and lower inflation. The cost of living dropped in May by the most in more than three years, Labor Department figures showed last month. A gallon of regular fuel at the pump cost an average $3.36 as of yesterday, down from this year’s peak of $3.94 in early April, according to AAA, the biggest U.S. auto group.

Retail Sales

Retailers reported this week that same-store sales rose 0.3 percent in June from a year earlier, based on results from more than 20 companies tracked by Retail Metrics Inc. Luxury chains such as Saks Inc. (SKS) and discounters like TJX Cos. topped analysts’ expectations, while stores targeting middle-income consumers trailed projections.

“What we are seeing today from an income perspective is our economy is modestly adding jobs,” Robert Hull, chief financial officer at Lowe’s Cos., the second-largest U.S. home- improvement retailer, said at a June 26 consumer conference in Boston. “That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s not sufficient to have a material impact on the unemployment rate.”

The jobless rate held at 8.2 percent in June, today’s report showed. Unemployment has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, the longest such stretch since monthly records began in 1948.

Fed Outlook

The “mixed” jobs report suggests that Federal Reserve policy makers are unlikely to take further action to boost the economy at their next meeting, such as a third round of so- called quantitative easing, said David Greenlaw, a managing director and economist at Morgan Stanley in New York.

“We don’t think the report was quite bad enough to tip the scales toward doing something like QE3,” Greenlaw said. “But I certainly think there’s plenty of fodder for discussion and definitely some indication that the Fed needs to be more worried about prospects for growth going forward.”

Private employment, which excludes government agencies, increased 84,000 in June, the weakest in 10 months. Retailers cut payrolls by 5,400, while manufacturers added 11,000 workers.

The report “reminds everyone that confidence matters,” said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors in Holland, Pennsylvania. “In June, the European debt issue reached a boil and a meltdown could not be ruled out. That had to have a major impact on business confidence.”

Europe’s Influence

Concerns about Europe are lingering, with the euro slumping to a two-year low of $1.2260 today and yields on 10-year Spanish bonds rising to more than 7 percent. The decline in Spanish bond prices came even though the European Central Bank yesterday reduced its benchmark rate to a record low of 0.75 percent.

Uncertainty about the U.S. government’s fiscal outlook may also be hampering hiring plans. Congress has yet to resolve the so-called fiscal cliff, which represents more than $600 billion in higher taxes and reductions in defense and other government programs in 2013 that will take place without action.

The best strategy for companies to follow when confronted with such uncertainty ahead of Dec. 31 is to “stay lean and keep your inventories taut,” Sandy Cutler, chief executive officer of industrial equipment-maker Eaton Corp. (ETN) in Cleveland, told a conference May 31.

®2012 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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rogue49 · Jul 8, 2012

Two new ones...
When is the U.S. going to clean house??? The Brits are starting to look under the rug.

Groups Shield Political Gifts of Businesses
By MIKE McINTIRE and NICHOLAS CONFESSORE | July 7, 2012

American Electric Power, one of the country’s largest utilities, gave $1 million last November to the Founding Fund, a new tax-exempt group that intends to raise most of its money from corporations and push for limited government.

The giant insurer Aetna directed more than $3 million last year to the American Action Network, a Republican-leaning nonprofit organization that has spent millions of dollars attacking lawmakers who voted for President Obama’s health care bill — even as Aetna’s president publicly voiced support for the legislation.

Other corporations, including Prudential Financial, Dow Chemical and the drugmaker Merck, have poured millions of dollars more into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a tax-exempt trade group that has pledged to spend at least $50 million on political advertising this election cycle.

Two years after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the door for corporate spending on elections, relatively little money has flowed from company treasuries into “super PACs,” which can accept unlimited contributions but must also disclose donors. Instead, there is growing evidence that large corporations are trying to influence campaigns by donating money to tax-exempt organizations that can spend millions of dollars without being subject to the disclosure requirements that apply to candidates, parties and PACs.

The secrecy shrouding these groups makes a full accounting of corporate influence on the electoral process impossible. But glimpses of their donors emerged in a New York Times review of corporate governance reports, tax returns of nonprofit organizations and regulatory filings by insurers and labor unions.

The review found that corporate donations — many of them previously unreported — went to groups large and small, dedicated to shaping public policy on the state and national levels. From a redistricting fight in Minnesota to the sprawling battleground of the 2012 presidential and Congressional elections, corporations are opening their wallets and altering the political world.

Some of the biggest recipients of corporate money are organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, the federal designation for “social welfare” groups dedicated to advancing broad community interests. Because they are not technically political organizations, they do not have to register with or disclose their donors to the Federal Election Commission, potentially shielding corporate contributors from shareholders or others unhappy with their political positions.

“Companies want to be able to quietly push for their political agendas without being held accountable for it by their customers,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has filed complaints against issue groups. “I think the 501(c)(4)’s are likely to outweigh super PAC spending, because so many donors want to remain anonymous.”

Because social welfare groups are prohibited from devoting themselves primarily to political activity, many spend the bulk of their money on issue advertisements that purport to be educational, not political, in nature. In May, for example, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, a group co-founded by the Republican strategist Karl Rove, began a $25 million advertising campaign, carefully shaped with focus groups of undecided voters, that attacks Mr. Obama for increasing the federal deficit and urges him to cut spending.

The Internal Revenue Service has no clear test for determining what constitutes excessive political activity by a social welfare group. And tax-exempt groups are permitted to begin raising and spending money even before the I.R.S. formally recognizes them. Two years after helping Republicans win control of the House with millions of dollars in issue advertising, Crossroads GPS’s application for tax-exempt status is still pending.

During the 2010 midterm elections, tax-exempt groups outspent super PACs by a 3-to-2 margin, according to a recent study by the Center for Responsive Politics and the Center for Public Integrity, with most of that money devoted to attacking Democrats or defending Republicans. And such groups have accounted for two-thirds of the political advertising bought by the biggest outside spenders so far in the 2012 election cycle, according to Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, with close to $100 million in issue ads.

The growing role of issue groups has prompted a rash of complaints and lawsuits from watchdog organizations accusing groups like the American Action Network, Crossroads and the pro-Obama Priorities USA of operating as sham charities whose primary purpose is not the promotion of social welfare, but winning elections. Efforts in Congress to force more disclosure for politically active nonprofit organizations have been repeatedly stymied by Republicans, who have described the push as an assault on free speech.

“These groups are being used as a conduit to hide from voters the identity of people and corporations who are bankrolling these television ads, which are designed to influence the outcome of elections,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland.

But Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for Crossroads, said, “Individuals and organizations have a First Amendment right to promote their beliefs through advertising, be that advertising against the Iraq war, against climate change or, in the case of Crossroads, advocating for free markets and limited government.”

Labor unions — themselves among the beneficiaries of Citizens United — have also donated millions of dollars to national super PACs and state-level nonprofit groups involved in battles over government spending, collective bargaining and health care.

Donations from corporations and unions alike must be disclosed if they go to expressly political groups like super PACs.

In April, for example, the air traffic controllers’ union contributed $1 million to a pro-Obama super PAC. But other contributions are harder to trace. Last year, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees gave $100,000 to Advancing Wisconsin, a tax-exempt group that supported labor’s fight with Republicans in that state; the donation was reported nowhere in Wisconsin, but it emerged in an annual financial report that unions must file with the federal Department of Labor.

Among the largest beneficiaries of corporate donations in recent years have been trade organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which largely backs Republican candidates. As a nonprofit “business league” under the tax code, the chamber does not have to disclose its supporters, who helped finance its $33 million in political ads in the 2010 midterm elections.

But voluntary disclosures by corporations — usually at the prodding of shareholder advocacy groups — shed some light on the use of trade groups for lobbying or as pass-throughs for political spending. A search of voluntary disclosures, some collected by the Center for Political Accountability, which advocates for transparency in corporate political spending, found more than $6 million in chamber donations by 10 companies last year.

Two of the largest came from Prudential Financial and Dow Chemical, which each gave $1.6 million, while Chevron, MetLife and Merck each gave at least $500,000. Some of the donations were directed to the chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, which lobbies for limits on liability suits.

Some contributions are disclosed by accident. Aetna’s check to the American Action Network, along with a $4.5 million contribution last year to the chamber, was mistakenly included in a filing with insurance regulators. The disclosure was first reported by SNL Financial, a trade publication. Even where companies pledge voluntary disclosure of political contributions, they often make an exception for donations to tax-exempt groups.

In 2007, Aetna signed an agreement with the Mercy Investment Program, a shareholders group, to disclose trade associations to which it made large contributions. On regulatory filings, the company initially described its $3 million contribution to the Chamber of Commerce as a lobbying expense, but the company now says it was intended to finance “educational activities.”

An Aetna spokesman would not say whether the chamber donation would appear on the company’s 2011 voluntary disclosure. Sister Valerie Heinonen, the director of shareholder advocacy for Mercy Investment Services, said that a failure to do so would violate the company’s pledge.

Beyond the contributions to large, established nonprofits like the chamber and American Action Network, corporate money is also quietly shaping the political discourse through more obscure groups, none of which are required to disclose their donors.

In Minnesota last year, Express Scripts, a major drug benefit manager, gave $10,000 to a Republican-linked group, Minnesotans for a Fair Redistricting, involved in a partisan fight over redrawing legislative boundaries. Express Scripts made the donation, previously unreported, because the “electoral maps in Minnesota were in doubt and we supported efforts to bring certainty to Minnesota voters,” said Brian Henry, a spokesman for the company, which is based in St. Louis. He added that the firm has a facility in Bloomington, Minn.

The reasons behind American Electric Power’s $1 million contribution to the little-known Founding Fund are less clear. The company characterized it as “lobbying” in a corporate governance disclosure last year, but the fund says it does no lobbying. The fund, whose address is a mail drop in Alexandria, Va., would not make any of its directors available for an interview.

The fund’s treasurer, Frank Sadler, is a lobbyist who previously worked for Koch Industries advising nonprofit groups that support free market causes, although he said the Kochs, major Republican donors, were not involved in the group. In its public filings, the fund said it expected to raise about $10 million this election cycle, primarily from corporations, and use it to promote free markets and “the narrowing of the scope and reach of the federal government.”

A spokesman for American Electric Power, Pat D. Hemlepp, said the company supports organizations “with positions on issues that align with AEP’s positions” and strives to be transparent on political giving. “We also respect the positions of others, including some of the organizations that receive funding from AEP, to not publicly disclose funding or activities. That’s their right under the law.”
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The British, at Least, Are Getting Tough
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON | July 7, 2012

THE unfolding story of how Barclays — and, in all likelihood, other big banks — rigged interest rates is full of telling tidbits about the way Wall Street works. It also represents yet another teachable moment.

By now the world knows that Barclays manipulated the most widely used benchmark rate, the London interbank offered rate. But Barclays is just one member of the cozy club that sets the Libor, which is supposed to be based on the average rate at which large banks can borrow money overnight. It’s not based on actual transactions, however — and that leaves room for mischief.

And mischief there was, according to e-mails and other documents that Barclays has turned over to regulators in the United States and Britain. The upshot: traders colluded by posting rates that either helped their bets in the markets or their bank’s perceived financial strength during the harrowing days of 2008.

Manipulating the Libor is a big deal because it affects the cost of money for almost everyone. The Libor is used to set rates on mortgages, credit cards and all manner of loans, personal and commercial. The amount of money affected by the phony rates is at least $500 trillion, British regulators have estimated.

Barclays is not the only bank under investigation for rigging the Libor. It was simply the first to own up to the behavior and settle with regulators, paying $450 million. Other banks will almost certainly follow, and the documents bound to bubble up in those cases will surely prove fascinating.

One of the most revealing exchanges in the Barclays documents came when a bank official tried to describe why Barclays’s improper postings were not as problematic as those of other banks. “We’re clean but we’re dirty-clean, rather than clean-clean,” an executive said in a phone conversation. Talk about defining deviancy down.

“Dirty clean” versus “clean clean” pretty much sums up Wall Street’s view of cheating. If everybody does it, nobody should be held accountable if caught. Alas, many United States regulators and prosecutors seem to have bought into this argument.

British authorities have not. Last week’s defenestrations of Marcus Agius, the Barclays chairman; Robert E. Diamond Jr., its hard-charging chief executive; and Jerry del Missier, its chief operating officer, apparently occurred at the behest of the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, the nation’s top securities regulator. (Mr. del Missier also seems to have lost his post as chairman of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the big Wall Street lobbying group. His name vanished last week from the list of board members on the group’s Web site.)

MR. DIAMOND seemed shocked to be pushed out. An American by birth, he probably thought he’d be subject to American rules of engagement when confronted with evidence of wrongdoing at his bank. You know how it works on this side of the Atlantic: faced with a scandal, most chief executives jettison low-level employees, maybe give up a bonus or two — and then ride out the storm. Regulators, if they act, just extract fines from the shareholders.

British officials are taking a different approach with this scandal. George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, was direct in his assessment of Barclays’s activities. “It is clear that what happened in Barclays and potentially other banks was completely unacceptable, was symptomatic of a financial system that elevated greed above all other concerns and brought our economy to its knees,” he said in a statement on June 28. “Punish wrongdoing. Right the wrong of the age of irresponsibility.”

Later, in a speech to Parliament, Mr. Osborne voiced the question that so many have asked recently in the United States. “Fraud is a crime in ordinary business — why shouldn’t it be so in banking?” he asked.

Perhaps the biggest lesson from the Libor scandal is how dangerous it is to rely on interested parties to set interest rates or prices of financial instruments, rather than on actual transactions conducted by investors. The Libor has been set in the current and vulnerable manner since the late 1960s. Maybe it has never been rigged before, but who knows?

It is far better to have the transparent and verifiable record of prices created by a tape of electronic trading. Such records are standard pricing mechanisms for many securities. But not all.

Prices of derivatives, especially credit default swaps that trade one-to-one, can still be based on one dealer’s say-so. That’s why a rule proposed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that would require pretrade price transparency in the swaps market is so important.

But it is also why Wall Street is pushing back, especially on the commission’s proposal that swap execution facilities provide market participants, before they buy or sell, with easily accessible prices on “a centralized electronic screen.” The commission’s rule would eliminate the one-to-one dealings by telephone that are so lucrative to traders and so expensive to investors.

A bill intended to gut the commission’s proposed rule and to maintain dealers’ profits in derivatives failed to go anywhere after being passed last year by two committees in the House of Representatives — Financial Services and Agriculture. That was a good thing.

But there are rumblings in Washington that this bill has resurfaced and that it may be quietly attached to a House Agriculture Committee appropriations bill scheduled for a vote this month. The bill, if passed, would bar the requirement for a centralized pricing platform to shed light on the enormous swaps market. It would also prevent regulators from requiring that a number of participants provide price quotations to customers, a way to ensure fairness.

It’s hard to believe, in the wake of the Libor mess, that Wall Street and its supporters in Congress would continue to battle against price transparency in any market. Then again, that’s precisely what they did after the credit crisis.

With each new financial imbroglio, the gulf widens between Main Street’s opinion of Wall Street and the industry’s view of itself. When Mr. del Missier, the former Barclays chief operating officer, took over as chairman of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association last November, he said: “We will continue to work on maintaining and burnishing the level of confidence investors have in our markets, in our own financial institutions, and in the general economic outlook for the future.”

Given the Libor scandal, let’s just say good luck with that.
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rogue49 · Jul 9, 2012

Out of curiousity...

What things do you think have increased significantly over the past 2 decades
that have helped weigh-down and over-burden the avg. citizen???

Making the cost of living more difficult in comparison to previous generations.
Or have we just reached too far, too fast...and bought into a lifestyle portrayed by others?
Or both???

Student Loans

Morgages

Credit industry

Insurance

Food price increases

Gas prices

Utility Bills

rogue49 · Jul 15, 2012

Great Scott!!
You mean that politician say the want fairness, but don't actually follow-thru with action?
And that citizens say they want fairness, but don't actually follow-up on those who are acting (or not)??
Say it isn't so...

How to Get Our Citizens Actually United
By DREW WESTEN

IMAGINE you’re the closest living relative of a child who just inherited $100 million after her parents died in a car crash. You’re a distant cousin, but if something happened to her, you’d be next in line.

She has juvenile diabetes. So you “adjust” her insulin prescription a bit yourself, doubling the dose. When that doesn’t work, you tell her a different drug works just as well, and when she’s reluctant, you offer her a trip to Disney World.

What would happen if you got caught? You’d probably be convicted of attempted murder and spend several years in prison.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced a settlement with the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. The company had, among a host of criminal actions, helped publish falsified data in a medical journal, failed to report the dangers of a drug and used “favors” like trips to Jamaica to persuade doctors to use its medications for unapproved — and unproven — purposes on children.

These two fact patterns have a lot in common, except that instead of endangering the life of one child, the company endangered the lives of many, and instead of anyone receiving prison time, the company agreed to pay a fine — which it will no doubt pass on to its customers and shareholders — that is, to us.

This isn’t an exception. Several other pharmaceutical companies, The New York Times reported, have recently agreed to similar settlements.

So why has no one been criminally prosecuted? Why is no one politically accountable?

The same reason no one on Wall Street has been held accountable four years after perpetrating the greatest financial crime on the American people since the events leading up to the Great Depression, a heist that has cost millions of people their homes and their jobs. The same reason no one has been held accountable for pouring 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico during the BP oil spill. (In April, I spent a week with my family on a beautiful stretch of beach we’d visited many times during the kids’ spring break, except this time I watched as preschoolers made sand castles with sludge-colored sand and wondered about the unknown health effects on their young bodies.)

Source: Drew Westen, Emory University

Democrats blame Washington’s inability to get anything done on Republican obstructionism, and in large part they are right. But there’s another part. In March, Senate Democrats couldn’t get the votes they needed in their own caucus to pass a bill that would end billions in subsidies to oil companies. They were lucky the Republicans are so corrupt that all but two of them voted to preserve the subsidies.

It didn’t — and doesn’t — have to be this way. In early 2010 I was approached by a coalition of public interest groups determined to wage a successful campaign to finance clean, fair elections. The policy they advocated was pretty simple. Right now, the first question party officials responsible for recruiting candidates for Congress ask is, “How much money can you raise?” How deeply you share the values of the party is a secondary consideration.

So how can we get away from money-driven candidacies? Let the folks back home decide who gets funding.

The idea behind the Fair Elections bill was that candidates could solicit small donations from people in their state or district — whether up to $100, $250 or $500 — and if they crossed a threshold of support designed to avoid subsidizing fringe candidates, they would receive $4 of public matching funds for every dollar they raised. It wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime. Ending the oil subsidies the Senate rejected, for example, would provide as much as $4 billion every two years — roughly twice what all Congressional candidates combined spent in the 2010 elections. In effect, the savings in corruption would finance campaigns.

The question was how to talk about it. Voters aren’t interested in “process” issues. They want to know about outcomes. Voters from right to left will tell you, for example, that they overwhelming reject the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision to allow unlimited, anonymous money to flood our political system. But getting them worked up about election laws isn’t easy. You have to connect the dots to something that matters to them — like the fact that once-middle-class workers have seen their incomes drop by nearly 8 percent in three years and their wealth disappear by a staggering 40 percent. And you have to make sure they believe that the problem is not, as the right would have it, the extravagant pensions of teachers like my 82-year-old mother (who taught for over 30 years before retiring from the Atlanta city schools), but the actions of bankers and C.E.O.’s who’ve engineered a system that is decimating the middle class.

In studying voters’ responses to a range of messages, we discovered that Americans understand that our government is bought — and they want it back. You just have to speak with them in ways they can hear.

After reading a paragraph that described the Fair Elections bill, voters listened to messages online, moving their cursors, second by second, up if they liked what they were hearing and down if they didn’t. Our best-testing message led the dials steadily upward (producing the findings illustrated in the chart accompanying this article).

The results look like the dial tests viewers often see at the bottom of their television screens during presidential debates, except that they reflect the average of hundreds of people, not just 30 in a studio. What is perhaps most striking and unusual in this kind of message testing is the absence of virtually any differences in the reactions of Republicans, Democrats and independents. “It’s time we return to government of, by and for the people, not government of, bought and paid for by special interests,” the message began, and proceeded to develop that theme. It pointed out that “the job of a Wall Street banker is to get a good return on their investment, and unfortunately, they’ve taken those skills to Washington,” before landing on the idea that “politicians should work for us, not their corporate sponsors.”

That message beat a strong opposition message, 61 percent to 19 percent. And it was only one of several messages that won by extremely large margins.

So why isn’t Fair Elections the law of the land? We had consultants from both political parties on our team. We had the chair of the House Democratic Caucus, John B. Larson, sponsoring the legislation, and a high-ranking member of the Democratic Senate leadership, Richard J. Durbin, sponsoring it in the Senate. And at that time (the summer of 2010), Democrats controlled the House, the Senate and the White House. As I told the Democrats, they could probably save 20 seats in the House if they ran on this issue and a tax on millionaires, which was also wildly popular. But the bill never saw the light of day. (Neither did the millionaire’s tax.)

Precisely why Democrats never ran on or passed the bill is complex. Most members of Congress I’ve spoken with hate the current system, which relegates them to spending half their time like telemarketers begging donors for money. And those who aren’t completely corrupted by a system designed to corrupt even the most decent person often find themselves aware, at some level of consciousness, that what is for sale is their souls, as they compromise the interests of their constituents for the special interests of the few.

But the reality is that incumbents who play by the rules of a campaign-finance system that rewards the rich and well-connected tend to reap the corresponding electoral rewards, whereas those who refuse to play find themselves barraged at election time with millions of dollars in negative ads.

What’s the solution for this kind of constitutional Catch-22, where the people who gain from a broken system are the people who would have to fix it, and those who refuse to play ball tend to find themselves benched?

Probably the best chance we have as citizens genuinely united requires two steps.

First, we have to demand that candidates of both parties for the House and Senate sign a pledge to pass the Fair Elections bill in January 2013. Second, we must insist on a similar pledge from both national and state legislative candidates that they will vote for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and to declare that only voters with beating hearts constitute people for the purposes of elections — even if it takes having stethoscopes at every polling station to make sure no corporation tries to slip in as a person. Voters could then refuse to re-elect candidates who reneged on their pledges, irrespective of party.

Without this issue resolved, nothing else matters. The major difference between Wall Street today and four years ago is that the mergers following the crash made the banks even larger. America’s banks remain too big to fail because their campaign contributions remain too big to ignore. Even when legislators are successful, as they were with Wall Street reform, in imposing some regulatory constraints on an out-of-control industry, opportunities for lobbyists to derail that reform present themselves at every step along the way, from the process in which the two houses of Congress agree on final common language for bills, to the rules the administration writes, or fails to write, to implement the law. Last September, for example, President Obama overruled a unanimous panel of scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency and rejected the clean air standards they proposed, something even Richard Nixon, who created the E.P.A., would have been unlikely to do.

But that was a bygone era, before billion-dollar elections. Legally laundered cash in Washington soils everything it touches and prevents us from solving nearly every problem that we confront today.

The only answer to strength in dollars is strength in numbers.

Drew Westen is a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.”
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rogue49 · Jul 17, 2012

What I know is this...WHY ISN'T ANYONE IN FUCKING JAIL???

How long do the financial entities and those that run them get to RAPE our nations???

How long do we take to fucking PROSECUTE these assholes AND their companies???

This is not just damn civil, this is CRIMINAL!!

NOT just fines & settlements, but JAIL!

And this is NOT just the U.S....this goes for the rest of the post-industrial world too...

HSBC Probe Shows Bank Allowed Money Laundering
By Jesse Hamilton and David Voreacos - Jul 17, 2012

HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA) did business with firms linked to terrorism, failed to guard against money- laundering violations in Mexico and bypassed U.S. sanctions against Iran, according to U.S. Senate investigators.

HSBC affiliates worldwide gave terrorists, drug cartels and criminals a portal into the U.S. financial system, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said in a 335-page report yesterday detailing a decade of lax controls. Lawmakers plan to question senior executives from the London-based bank, Europe’s largest, at a hearing in Washington today.

“HSBC sets up a U.S. bank affiliate as its gateway into the U.S. financial system and lets its global network of affiliates abuse that gateway,” Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the subcommittee, told reporters. “The failure of accountability here is dramatic.”

Senate investigators focused on New York-based HSBC Bank USA NA as a “nexus” for U.S. dollar services and transfers. Their report will be the basis of a hearing in which senators question senior executives including Irene Dorner, president and chief executive of HSBC North America Holdings Inc., and the U.S. regulators accused in the report of failing to act.

HSBC rose 0.2 percent to 558 pence at 9:57 a.m. in London trading, valuing the bank at 102 billion pounds ($160 billion).

“We will acknowledge that, in the past, we have sometimes failed to meet the standards that regulators and customers expect,” Robert Sherman, an HSBC spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement. “We will apologize, acknowledge these mistakes, answer for our actions and give our absolute commitment to fixing what went wrong.”

Terrorist Financing

HSBC ignored links to terrorist financing among its customer banks, including Riyadh, Saudi Arabia-based Al Rajhi Bank, which had ties to terrorist groups through its owners, according to the report. Internal documents show HSBC decided to cut ties with the bank before reversing itself under pressure from Al Rajhi, which received shipments of $1 billion in cash from HSBC’s U.S. operation between 2006 and 2010, according to the report.

HSBC’s U.S. unit, with faulty safeguards, “offers a gateway for terrorists to gain access to U.S. dollars and the U.S. financial system,” according to the report. “HSBC has a legal obligation to take reasonable steps to ensure it is not dealing with banks that may have links to or facilitate terrorist financing.”

Mohammad Al Yami, an Al Rajhi spokesman, didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail sent outside of regular business hours requesting comment on the report.

‘Severe’ Deficiencies

HSBC bolstered its presence in Mexico in 2002 when it bought the nation’s fifth-largest bank, Grupo Financiero Bital SA, better known as Bital, which Senate investigators found had a history of “severe” deficiencies in anti-money-laundering controls. At the time, Bital had “no recognizable compliance or money-laundering function,” David Bagley, head of HSBC compliance, wrote in an internal e-mail.

From 2000 to 2009, HSBC gave its lowest risk rating to Mexico “despite overwhelming information indicating that Mexico was a high-risk jurisdiction for drug trafficking and money laundering,” Senate investigators wrote. HSBC’s Mexican clients included casas de cambio, or currency-exchange firms, that were identified in U.S. Treasury Department warnings as hubs for laundering drug money.

Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC)’s Wachovia Bank unit paid $160 million in 2010 to resolve a criminal probe that cartels were using such exchange houses to launder cash through the lender.

Bulk Cash

HSBC’s Mexican bank shipped $7 billion in bulk cash to the firm’s U.S. bank in 2007 and 2008. That was more than all HSBC affiliates and other banks in Mexico and left U.S. and Mexican authorities concerned that the volumes could only be supplied by the illegal drug trade, according to the report.

In 2007, the head of Latin America compliance sent an e- mail to a colleague condemning the Mexican affiliate for “rubber-stamping unacceptable risks,” according to the report.

“What is this, the School of Low Expectations Banking?” the executive, John Root, wrote in the e-mail.

Leopoldo Barroso, a former HSBC anti-money-laundering director, told company officials in an exit interview that he was concerned about civil and criminal sanctions and that there were “allegations of 60 percent to 70 percent of laundered proceeds in Mexico” going through HSBC’s affiliate, according to the report.

Iran Sanctions

The report also cited HSBC’s violations of Treasury Department sanctions on dealings with Iran, which the U.S. wants to isolate from the global banking system. The sanctions, enforced by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, seek to punish Iran for operating a nuclear program outside international inspection. Internal communications show the U.S. bankers were aware that some of the transactions were linked to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions.

An outside audit by Deloitte LLP showed that 25,000 transactions totaling more than $19.4 billion involved Iran, according to the report. Of those, as many as 90 percent passed through the bank’s U.S. accounts with no disclosure of ties to Iran, the report shows. Senate investigators documented similar transactions from a list of other prohibited jurisdictions including North Korea, Cuba, Sudan and Burma.

Bank documents also showed HSBC’s U.S. unit cleared dollar transactions through U.S. accounts for at least six Iranian banks.

Deferring Prosecution

Since 2009, the U.S. Justice Department entered deferred- prosecutions agreements with six banks over OFAC violations, including ING Groep NV (ING), Barclays Plc (BARC), ABN Amro Holding NV, Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) and Lloyds Banking Group Plc. (LLOY) Most violations involved stripping information from wire-transfer documentation to hide the role of a banned person or country.

HSBC has said that it’s cooperating with investigations by the Justice Department, Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency into possible Iran sanctions violations. It’s also cooperating in unrelated probes by the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service into whether it helped Americans evade taxes through HSBC India.

The bank may face a fine from regulators of as much as $1 billion according to some estimates, James Antos, an analyst at Mizuho Securities Asia Ltd. wrote in a note to investors today.

“This is an overhang that will be impossible to ignore when results are announced” for HSBC’s first half on July 30, wrote Antos.

Many of the Iran transfers described in the Senate report involved so-called U-turn transactions, which were allowed under Treasury regulations before November 2008. Those rules let U.S. banks process dollar payments involving Iran that began and ended with non-Iranian institutions.

In 2005 and 2006, HSBC processed about 1,800 U-turn transactions through a correspondent account at JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) The report quoted an e-mail from HSBC Middle East Deputy Chairman David Hodgkinson, who wrote that HSBC’s U.S. unit was “unwilling to process them for reputational-risk reasons.”

Sufficient Weight

The Senate probe also accuses the OCC, the primary regulator of HSBC’s U.S. bank, of failing to treat repeated findings of violations in money-laundering controls with sufficient weight. The OCC tolerated severe money-laundering deficiencies “for years,” according to the report, while HSBC’s examiners were suggesting action to their supervisors at the agency.

Anti-money-laundering compliance “is crucial to our nation’s efforts to combat criminal activity and terrorism, and the OCC expects national banks and federal thrifts to have programs in place to effectively comply with these laws,” Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry said in a statement. The subcommittee made “very thoughtful recommendations in its report, which we fully embrace,” he said.

‘Pervasively Polluted’

“The culture at HSBC was pervasively polluted for a long time,” said Levin, who acknowledged the bank’s cooperation in the investigation. “Its recent change in leadership says that it is committed to cleaning house. That commitment is surely welcome. But tough OCC oversight is essential.”

Levin said the kind of failures HSBC exhibited should be cause for U.S. regulators to consider whether to revoke its charter.

The bank has repeatedly expressed remorse about “unacceptable behavior,” including in a July 10 memo by Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver, who took the helm in January 2011. The company has restructured itself to make compliance a more urgent priority, he wrote, and has bolstered staff devoted to such oversight from 200 to about 1,000.

HSBC’s Sherman, in his statement yesterday, said the bank’s lapses represent “important lessons for the whole industry.”
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pan6467 · Jul 23, 2012

rogue49 said: ↑

Out of curiousity...

What things do you think have increased significantly over the past 2 decades
that have helped weigh-down and over-burden the avg. citizen???

Making the cost of living more difficult in comparison to previous generations.
Or have we just reached too far, too fast...and bought into a lifestyle portrayed by others?
Or both???

Student Loans

Morgages

Credit industry

Insurance

Food price increases

Gas prices

Utility Bills

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I think it is a combination of things like out of control tuition and college book prices, causing lifelong debt because the job market cannot nor will not pay enough to cover the student loan debt and allow the worker to live a decent lifestyle.

I think the credit industry needs their rates regulated. IF YOUR bank wants to grant credit to "high risk" and/or a student's first credit card then the consumer should not have to pay exorbitant interest rates or monthly/yearly fees, to use the card YOU offered to give them.

There are serious issues with insurance companies when 10 are listed in the Fortune 500 and most if not all of those 10 are in double digits on the list. That shows me that profit means more than the human life their health insurance is supposedly covering. I think profit is good BUT when profit is your sole motive and NOT just the effect of good business it's wrong. It in turn drives up prices and makes it harder for those without insurance cover the prices that insurance refuses to pay. This causes hospitals/doctors and so on to go bankrupt and/or not be able to treat the people truly in need. When insurance will pick up some rich bitch's nose job and tummy tuck while someone with a treatable sinus infection has to face death and 4 surgeries because the system won't help him early in the illness to prevent that small infection becoming life threatening there is a serious problem. What does it say about insurance companies when they own the hospitals, own stock in the pharmaceuticals and medical instrument companies? Yet won't pay for the insured's preventative care?

Gas prices need to be held at a certain level and not just moved up and down randomly due to speculators trying to make money. It is near IMPOSSIBLE for companies and people to budget when the price of fuel is so volatile. This week it's $3.60/gallon, last week I filled my tank for $3.15/gallon. That's a 50 cent increase in a week's time. Should people and companies budget it at $4/gallon.

Mortgages due to the meltdown seem to be getting under some type of control, there is still far too many foreclosures than there should be. OUR TAX DOLLARS BAILED THE FUCKERS OUT AND THEY HAVE THE BALLS TO KEEP FORECLOSING AND RAISING INTEREST RATES, THEN WANT TO RAISE RATES ON STUDENT LOANS??????? That is a serious fucking problem facing our nation.

Food prices and utilities have a lot of government assisted programs available even for the higher end middle class. Rent subsidies are also available. As long as these programs exist, there is some hope for the lower class to move up.

BUT by far the most serious problem we face is a catch 22, IMHO. It's wages and decent paying jobs. How we can allow CEO's and upper management types, who know NOTHING about the businesses they run to make MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS while their workers have homes foreclosed upon and face bankruptcy if something serious happens to their car or illness because they live paycheck to paycheck, is something this country's government needs to address. If wages increase tax base increases, thus lowering the tax burden of the "very wealthy". However, those executives making MILLIONS upon MILLIONS a year are not going to willingly take pay cuts, they have a standard of living to maintain. There are very few that are paid purely on the performance of the companies they run, they would rather outsource jobs than pay livable wages. As the jobs evaporate, the need for cheaper product increases and tax base decreases forcing the "very wealthy" to pay more in taxes and find "tax havens" to hide the money. We have the GOP talking heads on the far right trying to convince everyone that TAXES not jobs are the problem.

roachboy · Jul 23, 2012

in some ways it's quite clear what's going on. class warfare.
these reports from the tax justice institute (look them up) indicates that an estimated 21 trillion dollars sits in off-shore tax havens. twenty one trillion dollars.

http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_120722.pdf

http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Inequality_120722_You_dont_know_the_half_of_it.pdf

the reports name institutions and names.
nary a word in the mainstream american press about it.
what a shock.

this quite apart from the LIBOR fixing scandal.
and the ongoing debacle generated by political and/or cognitive paralysis in the eu
and the ongoing debacle generated by political and/or cognitive paralysis in the u.s. of a..

it's like there's this stratum of ultra-right wealthy nihilists who look into the future and see their politics collapsing because they have nothing to say, nothing to offer. so they figure: this is the end of the world. people will want to take my shit. i better hide it. so the little people buy up ak-47s. the big people flee to tax havens.

twenty one trillion dollars.

Baraka_Guru · Jul 23, 2012

Oh, the perspective: $21 trillion is more than the American and Japanese economies combined.

It's disgusting.

However, I do like the term that's being bandied about: pirate banking.

redux · Jul 23, 2012

roachboy said: ↑

in some ways it's quite clear what's going on. class warfare.
these reports from the tax justice institute (look them up) indicates that an estimated 21 trillion dollars sits in off-shore tax havens. twenty one trillion dollars.

...

it's like there's this stratum of ultra-right wealthy nihilists who look into the future and see their politics collapsing because they have nothing to say, nothing to offer. so they figure: this is the end of the world. people will want to take my shit. i better hide it. so the little people buy up ak-47s. the big people flee to tax havens.

twenty one trillion dollars.
Click to expand...

Only to be aided and abetted by the EU austerity program and the proposed Republican budget/debt reduction scheme in the US.

roachboy · Jul 23, 2012

and people wonder why there's an occupy movement. the plutocracy should be on it's collective knees every day thanking whatever it is they imagine runs the show, and by extensions explains the radical inequalities in the distribution of wealth that explains their economic existence, that it has been contained to this point. the real problem for the existing order is that there's no significant difference between a centrist democrat and a centrist republican--both speak the same neo-liberal lingua franca. both are participant thereby in the entire ideology that's enabled this sort of obscene situation to take shape, and are complicit in allowing it to continue. there are no institutional remedies for this at this point, and none on the horizon. given the overall impotence in the face of neo-liberal generated balance sheet recession---which requires, according to richard koo anyway, significant and sustained state intervention in circulating capital through the economy---something that neo-liberalism has no way of allowing for---and given the ongoing surfacing of information concerning the magnitude of plunder that neo-liberalism has allowed, you'd think that the edifice itself would be tipping toward a very significant problem.

my inner marxist, who is a busy boy these days, thinks: burn it all down. replace it with an entirely different, more sensible and humane and equitable system. because what's in power now has not, is not, will not and cannot work. it can't even address the consequences of the implementation of it's own fucking ideology.

redux · Jul 23, 2012

My inner pragmatist would have to disagree, recognizing that the country is centrist but that a centrist republican is an oxymoron. While the Democrats may be center left, today's Republicans are extreme right, not center right.

Center left is achievable. Far left is not. The constituency does not exist. I am more a believer in change from within -- dance with the one that brung ya -- as opposed to burn it down and replace it.

Looking back on OWS, perhaps the movement would have been better served by focusing on restoring grass roots democracy, with a first step of promoting campaign finance reform. Get the corporate money out of politics and you open the door to candidates more accountable to the "people."

A congressman from MD will be introducing the Grassroots Democracy Act this week. It is actually a "voucher" system that would give EVERY voter a refundable $50 tax credit for congressional donations and additional public funds to candidates facing significant third-party SuperPac spending. While not perfect, it is this kind of initiative (short of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United) that I believe is the small step in the right direction that might slowly lead to a restoration of some level of accountability. It is DOA in a Republican House.

Nothing will change until we change how elections are financed.

Baraka_Guru · Jul 23, 2012

It's a self-destructing disaster in slow motion, which is why its proponents will say it works, and it's why they blame socialist bogeymen for all the bad things that happen.

roachboy · Jul 23, 2012

i'm not going to get into a discussion of what these categories "far left" etc. mean. i don't see them as meaning anything outside of the peculiar, circular system of label generation that's of a piece with the broader discursive framework that functions to make this narrow conservative oligarchy appear to be representative. but i agree entirely with the need to get corporate money out of the political process. the idea of grassroots democracy in a system as unresponsive as the american is peculiar. effectively, people are politically free for one day every other year. the system cannot bring down a government with a vote of no confidence. we were saddled with the epic disaster that was the bush administration for 8 years as a result of this inability. i think there are some basic changes to how the american system operates that are of a piece with thinking in terms of grassroots democracy if it is to mean anything. a more parliamentary style of governance would be a start. a greater diversity of political parties would be another. forcing a rather massive redistribution of wealth would be yet another. breaking up the big banks, nationalizing them if necessary. there has to be something done about the vacuity of the dominant media as well, which does almost nothing to serve a democratic polity. seriously...television as an infotainment system is a joke. i wouldn't be opposed to nationalizing all of the main networks simply as a way of forcing a change in orientation and them making them publicly held again. but this system of infotainment delivery in the states is seriously a farce.

dealing with the 21 trillion matter would require a different form of transnational regulation along with the institutions that would be required to enforce it. but the development of capitalism has for some time been such that nation-states are obsolete. the problem that raises--and it's a big one--is how any transnational institutions are supposed to be democratically accountable, even in theory. the eu is obviously not.

that said, i don't oppose the initiative you outline. it's just nothing like adequate. it's a nice gesture, but little more than that. i wonder, though, why it's not getting more attention out there in the wider world? there's no given-in-advance answer to that in my mind---i just find it odd, that's all. maybe a demonstration of the points about about the infotainment system and why, if the idea of democracy is still meaningful in the united states---and i think it's mostly just a word---that a basically different media system is far more important than gestures like you point to. which, again, i'm pleased to know about.

pan6467 · Jul 23, 2012

roachboy said: ↑

twenty one trillion dollars.
Click to expand...

It's far more than just 21 trillion dollars, the article states it is 21 trillion POUNDS... that would make it a considerable amount more than 21 trillion dollars.

Sorry just wanted to clarify that.

roachboy · Jul 23, 2012

on page 5 0f the report--which i've only just had a chance to start really digging into (i'll look at it more once this fucking editing is out of the way for the evening) is 21-32 trillion dollars. i've seen the figure of 13 trillion pounds floating about on uk websites. it's an enormous amount of money...but look for yourself. the report is way more interesting than anything i've written.

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